Technical challenges. Ex ante constraints raise technical challenges not usually encountered in the literature on persuasion.
In our model, we cannot restrict attention to straightforward policies [1]} in which Sender recommends an action to Receiver in an incentive-compatible way. These policies are a very central tool in persuasion problems and are widely applied across the literature , but they are not descriptive enough for determining whether a given ex ante constraint is satisfied.
In particular, an optimal signaling scheme in our model cannot be described by a finite linear program (LP). Note that we do not assume Receiver's action space is finite, but even such a simplifying assumption would not have resolved these issues.
